Sermons Preached at Church of the Redeemer

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas: January 2, 2005

Jesus of Nazareth:  Child of Disaster

How do you make sense of terror, disaster of unimaginable proportions, cataclysmic loss of life followed by certain desperation and disease that will take at least as many as have died up 'til now? In the midst of this sea of darkness, we say “To us a child is born, a son is given, and his name shall be called wonderful, counselor, Prince of peace.”  What good is the birth of one child in the midst of such anguish? 

Explaining the causes of the disaster only heightens its enormity.  On the day that we gathered to sing the gentle songs of Christmas, the earth’s mantle shrugged.  Under the islands of Indonesia, a long section of the tectonic plate that had been winding up like a watch spring since 1861, suddenly let loose with a force roughly equivalent to 32 billion tons of TNT, transmitting its power directly to the sea above.  But all that convergence of geography and history found its meaning in real human lives, such as that of Yusmadi Sulaiman, a delivery man in Banda Aceh, who grabbed his four-year-old son and hugged a tree as the waters raged around him taking his wife and daughter and, finally, sucking his boy out of his arms as well.  The fact that this scenario is repeated tens, or hundreds, of thousands of times does not alter the fact that in each life, in each family, in each village was created an abyss that will take generations to heal. 

Perhaps prophecy could have helped.  A warning system might have done a world of good, but there was none in place, in part due to the geographical biases of the scientific establishment and the complacency of governments in the region.  Imagine the frustration of Vasily Titov, a mathematician and seismologist in Seattle, who rushed to his office late on Christmas Day, two hours after the quake, and began constructing the first computer model of the tsunami.  As the horrors unfolded on his screen, he realized he had no idea whom to call.  All he could do was complete the picture of the disaster, like Isaiah and Jeremiah and so many other prophets before him, finishing his work in the small hours of Sunday morning as the wave crashed on the shores of Africa.  In this case, both science and prophecy could only describe what was happening, but could do nothing to change it.

Because we are generally tired of Christmas by the 26^th of December, it is easy for us to miss the point of the succeeding Sundays.  Saint John last week, and Saint Matthew this week are under no illusions concerning what kind of a world the Christ child has been born into.  In the reading today, geography and history converge into a particular meaning as this family—Mary, Joseph, with their new baby—runs for its life:  homeless and hunted, out of Judea, international refugees by night, hiding in a foreign land, finally creeping past the border into home territory and settling among Gentiles and strangers in an odd place call Nazareth, as if they had been enrolled in a federal witness protection program.  You might have thought the boy would grow up looking over his shoulder, the paranoid child of traumatized parents.  But in fact here it was the spirit of God leading them through the darkness that made all the difference:  that mysterious angel of the unconscious cropping up again and again saying, “now flee; now stay put; now return.”  The Child is nursed in the midst of disaster, and weaned on the road.  God can credibly say, he has experienced the horrors of dislocation, random death, senseless, brutal and indifferent governments, from the time of Jesus’ birth through the whole of his life, culminating in the Cross.  Far from being traumatized, Christ never expected his life to be otherwise.  What he expected was that all of this horror would be carried in his flesh through death into his own victory over death, and out of that victory would rise a people—His own Body—who might bring healing and mercy in his name until the day when the fabric of the universe torn by sin and death would be finally healed. 

That is who we are.  Do we dare let our lives be permanently changed by our compassion, our union with those who suffer.  Do we dare to begin with a single step, knowing that out of that may stretch a road whose end is uncertain?  Our union in the blood of Christ says that those who have died are our sisters and brothers, our very flesh.  Perhaps if we can discover how it is we are to grieve for them, we may find the way that God through our hearts will help them and use this horror to build his Kingdom.     

Amen.